Ok, this is impressive, but it was built with modern tools. And these are certainly impressive, and ancient, too, but they were made in the desert, and they aren’t that deep. The above, though? Wow.
These are all geoglyphs: the first one is a positive geoglyph, which is when you put something on top of the ground, while the latter two are negative geoglyphs, i.e., they’re carved out of the ground. The eagle is a modern-day sculpture from Australia, inspired by Aboriginal myths. The spider is one of the motifs that together make up the Nazca lines, in the Peruvian desert, presumed to have been created sometime around 400-600 AD. That’s more impressive, but then again, the Nazca is a desert. The above picture, though, is of one of the many geoglyphs discovered in satelite images from deforested parts of the Amazon. The Nazca lines are less than a half-meter deep; according to the Treehugger article, the Amazonian geoglyphs, while less complex motifs (generally geometric shapes), are an astounding four meters deep and twelve meters across at the widest. And they were probably built some 700 years ago, while the jungle was still there. I’m no archaeologist or historian, so I can’t make an educated guess, but my uneducated guess would put the effort to build these in the same ballpark as the Egyptian pyramids. Yet there is no way you can see them on the ground. There’s a reason most of these weren’t discovered until recently: not only were they in thick forest, they’re so large you can’t get a sense of their shape unless you’re up above. It boggles the mind that someone would go to all that trouble just to create a work of art that, as far as we know, has no practical use, and which is designed to be viewed from a vantage point that no human could attain until a hundred years ago.
Oct 8, 2010
